Dublin opens up: ‘It’s a sign that life is getting back to normal’

The sun gods are smiling on Dublin as a new week and a new era starts making it impossible to miss the signs that the city is returning to the way it was in the rare auld times before Covid-19 saw everything changed utterly.

There’s the bride beaming as she daintily steps across a busy road into City Hall to the strains of a string quartet allowed to play again for the first time in more than 18 months.

Packed buses criss-cross College Green, their engines almost drowning out a soft-spoken guide who looks nervously at unfamiliar notes as she explains to a group of eager tourists why the Bank of Ireland is windowless.

A bleary-eyed hen party huddles over curative bottles of cider in Temple Bar while Trinity College's front square teems with student life. An open-top bus full of tourists trundles down O'Connell St and traffic jams form along busy streets with red-faced men leaning heavily on car horns providing a soundtrack reminiscent of times past.

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Ella Hussey and Laura Mellet are thrilled to be back in the city centre and meeting other students for the first time since they started college last autumn.

The pair are studying English at Trinity but while they are going into second year, this will be the first year they will get to experience college life the way it is supposed to be experienced.

“It’s strange to actually have people around and be able to go in and out without any regulations, apart from making sure we have our masks and stuff,” Hussey says. “We don’t have to actually book to go in or anything.”

Mellet is, if anything even happier. “I think I’m more excited than anything else,” she says. “It feels like we’re getting a first year again and it’s a good chance to actually meet people. It’s not the same meeting people online or on Zoom. That was really, really annoying.”

And how did Mellet and Hussey meet?

“Oh, we met on Zoom,” the pair say in unison.

Elaine Anderson is dressed in an ivory-coloured wedding dress and she literally stops traffic as she gingerly crosses the road from the Hard Rock Hotel on Dame St to City Hall.

She is running late but is happy to talk to The Irish Times for a minute, or perhaps more accurately she tolerates the intrusion for a few seconds.

“I can’t believe our wedding is taking place on the day the restrictions are lifted and that we will actually get to sing and dance with our family and friends,” she says.

She and her very-soon-to-be husband Joe Czucha had been following the news anxiously in recent months, without any certainty their wedding would be able to go ahead as planned. “We didn’t want to be breaking any rules and we had people coming from the UK and everything so we didn’t want to disappoint them.”

In a Temple Bar buzzing with life is Annie Craig. She's wearing a veil too but is still weeks away from her big day. She and a group of fellow Derry girls came down to Dublin for her hen weekend and they are all just a bit hoarse as the party comes to an end.

“We’ve been here all weekend but we’ve been going crazy to be fair,” she whispers. “It’s been the best craic ever.”

Having had to change the date of her wedding “maybe like two or three times” she is now starting to believe it will actually happen next month. “I wanted a bigger wedding obviously but now we can get maybe 100 people so that’s not too bad.”

Back at City Hall, Siofra Grant can scarcely contain her delight at being back in business with her string quartet and getting ready to play at a wedding for the first time since March 2020. "It's just wonderful to be able to perform again and it is a sign that life is getting back to normal," she says.

Like almost every other musician, work vanished once Covid hit but she stresses that the welfare of her family and friends was of paramount importance throughout the crisis. “I just had to hope and pray that we weren’t personally affected, that was my focus and it came before anything.”

“But now, thankfully, things seem to be getting moving again. The phone is starting to ring and the inquiries are coming in so it is lovely to be back doing what we do.”